quicko: quantifiers

Good heavens this is boring, but I haven't got any other ideas today besides what I was teaching my students:  quantifiers and countable/uncountable nouns.  You probably haven't got a clue what they are, but I'm willing to bet you almost always use them correctly if you're a native speaker of English.

They're the reason we say "the tourist office gave me so much information" instead of "the tourist office gave me so many information."  Much and many are quantifiers, and "information" is an uncountable noun, which can only be used with "much" and its kin, as opposed to countable nouns that can be used with "many" and its ilk.  Most nouns are countable (books, chairs, toys, etc.) and thus have a plural form (books vs. book), but a very significant handful are uncountable (information, advice, traffic, furniture, equipment, money, trouble, time, most materials -- wood/paper/stone/etc, most liquids -- tea/coffee/milk/water/wine/etc, etc.).

For the record, there's also a lot of nouns that can be both, depending on their meaning.  Hence, we have three turkeys (living, clucking beings), but too much turkey on your plate at Thanksgiving.  Or ten pizzas, which can feed a party, but ten pieces of pizza, which cannot.  And let's not even think about the dreaded "paper."

Now there's your ESL grammar lesson.  Your blog post is this:  generally speaking, British, Australian and American English follow similar lines where these nouns are concerned.  However, my students are bona fide experts at finding the times they do not.  "How _____ ______ do you take in your tea?" (sugar) their textbook asks.  "Ah, yes," I tell them.  "How much sugar?"  But wait!  They have been listening to Australians (it's the only time they do -- when they think they're catching their teacher in a well-dug and similarly hidden pit) and the Australians say, "How many sugars do you take in your tea?"  (They also ask about ice creams and chocolates ... as for foods that don't contain sugar; well, I wouldn't really know much about them, would I?)  At which point I have to explain that Americans are thinking of sugar non-countably and Australians are thinking of packets of sugar (though of course no one of either nationality is actually thinking anything; they're simply talking like they know how to) and, yes, it is possible for someone in either of those two camps to sometimes switch to the other and back again, so really, whatever you've heard is correct, your teacher is still right, and now, please, please, let's move on to the next question!